Re-Arranging the 20th Century: Allegro, non Troppo

Gilad Atzmon

(Cartoon by Khalil)

February 23, 2006

"I say this as the child of a German Jewish-born father who escaped in
time. His mother did not. I say it as a half-Jewish German child chased
around a British playground in the second world war and taunted with
"he's not just a German, he's a Jew". A double insult. But I say this
too as a Christian priest who shares the historic guilt of all the
churches. All Christians share a bloody inheritance." Paul Oestreicher - The Guardian Monday 20th February 2006 (Paul Oestreicher is a chaplain at the University of Sussex)

"What about freedom of expression when anti-Semitism is involved? Then
it is not freedom of expression. Then it is a crime. Yet when Islam is
insulted, certain powers raise the issue of freedom of expression." Amr Moussa, Arab League Secretary General

"There is a myth that we love freedom, others don’t: that our
attachment to freedom is a product of culture; that freedom, democracy,
human rights, the rule of law are American values, or Western
values…Ours are not Western values, they are the universal values of
the Human spirit". Tony Blair, a speech given at a joint session of the United States Congress, summer 2003

Tony
Blair may have gotten it right for a change, it is rather possible that
freedom, democracy and human rights, are 'universal values of the Human
spirit’. Yet, they have very little to do with Anglo-American and
Western governing philosophy and practices.

At
Guantánamo Bay people are detained for over three years without being
charged of any crime. If it were down to PM Blair and his infamous
Anti-Terror bill, spending up to three months behind bars without being
charged would be extended to the alleged enemies of the British people
as well. If freedom is indeed a high 'universal’ value of the human
spirit, Blair and Bush must have very limited knowledge of such a
spirit.

Anyhow, the following paper isn’t really about Blair or Bush; it is
about the highly deceiving Western discourse. It is about people who
claim to know what human spirit and universalism are all about. It is
about a worldview that is engaged in silencing others, not to say
killing in the name of 'freedom’, 'universalism’ and 'humanism’. It is
a search into the genealogy of the pompous emerging liberal
'Judeo-Christian’ discourse. It is a deconstruction of Western
political ideology and its deluded notion of the past.

The Personal is Political

Rather ostensibly, Anglo-American political argumentation is gradually
taking the form of a pornographic appeal to one’s empathy. It is
grounded on a distribution of sporadic stories of personal pain. Once
Blair or Bush feel the urge to flatten an Arab country, all they have
to do is to provide their supportive media outlets with some painful
personal accounts of an exiled dissident voice who would willingly and
enthusiastically share with us some horrendous graphic details of his
troubles at home. In most cases, we are then instantly predisposed to
military intervention and we stand behind our democratically elected
governments, collectively providing them with the mandate to kill in
the name of freedom and democracy.

As it happens, a given personal account, without even being verified or
validated can easily become a legal indictment of a country, its
leadership, a culture, a people and even an entire gender. Apparently,
the phrase 'the personal is political’ serves as an efficient political
argumentative apparatus. While pre-WWII Western politicians tended to
make us believe that politics must transcend beyond the personal and
what may seem as contingent, within the post-WWII Western political
discourse, as long as it serves the Western hegemony, the personal is
nothing but political.

As we know, it was different American feminists’ networks that were the
first to call a war on the Talibans, spreading the personal accounts of
some abused Afghani women. Whether consciously or not, they were laying
the groundwork for Clinton and Bush’s war against Islam. Similarly, it
was the personal accounts of the gassed Kurds of Halabja that were
preparing the 'international community’ for the war against Saddam. It
was the personal accounts of Jewish survivors told after WWII that
retrospectively justified the outrageous Anglo-American carpet-bombing
of German cities towards the end of that war.

In the past, I suggested a skeptical philosophical take of the notion
of the personal narrative in the light of Heidegger’s Hermeneutic
criticism of Husserl’s Phenomenology.[1] However, in the current paper
I will engage myself with questions pertaining to the politics of the
very shift from the personal to the political.

Currently, our political commitment is in large part determined by our
reaction to personal narratives. Whether it is the personal story of
the female rape victim or a detailed graphic account of an exiled
Halabja resident, the Western subject is now properly trained in
reacting politically and correctly to any given personal account. In
metaphysical terms, the Western being has managed to rise above and
resolve the old problem of induction; it is now adept at easily
deducing a general political rule out of a very singular tale. This
isn’t a big surprise, at the end of the day, human beings do tend to
generalise. In metaphysical terms we have learned to avoid doubts
having to do with our general tendencies.

But in fact it is slightly deeper: the shift from the personal to the
political allows the Western subject to regard himself as an integral
part of a cosmic 'universal’, 'liberal’ and 'humanist’ order:
collectively he reacts 'humanly’ in a 'single voice’ manner. Indeed,
the empathetic sensation we detect within ourselves once confronting a
personal traumatic account is an effective manipulative tool used
rather often by our democratically elected leaders.

Auschwitz the Message

At least historically, it was within post-WWII Jewish discourse, both
Zionist and anti- Zionist, where a clear tendency to present the
personal as political could be easily detected. As bizarre as it may
sound, Jewish discourse both on the right and left equally
substantiates its argument by politicising the personal story of
Auschwitz.[2]

After all, this isn’t that surprising. Auschwitz is indeed a story of
very many singular human beings who are exploited and reduced into mere
livestock due to their sexual preferences, political beliefs and of
course ethnic or racial origin. Yet, it was the personal accounts told
by the liberated camp inmates that transformed WWII from the historical
chapter and ideological insight that it was into a mere 'political
narrative’ not to say a solid political argument.

At least politically, it is 'Auschwitz the message’ that provides the
Israeli government with (false) legitimacy to drop bombs on crowded
Palestinian urban areas. At the end of the day, after Auschwitz, the
Jews are now "entitled to defend themselves." It is Auschwitz the
message as well that entitles Norman Finkelstein, a child of Holocaust
survivor parents, to say what he has to say and receive commentary
based on this fact. Rather often Finkelstein would use his very
personal background as a core of legitimacy. But then, thinking about
it, if Finkelstein is indeed an academic scholar, presenting a solid
argument, which I am totally convinced he does, then we must be able to
address his arguments without any reference to his family background.
Academically, we should be able to address his ideas regardless of his
unique autobiography. Similarly, the moral ground to kill innocents in
the name of Auschwitz is rather suspicious. As we all know, it wasn’t
the Palestinians who sent European Jews to concentration camps in
Poland. Within the heavy smoke invoked by the personal trauma, not many
suggest to the Jews to redeem themselves of the personal traumatic
discourse of justification. Such a suggestion is sometimes regarded as
a form of Holocaust denial with some grave legal implications.

But in fact, it isn’t Jews alone who are capitalising on 'Auschwitz the
message’. It is in the shadow of that very message that Americans allow
themselves to kill millions of innocent civilians in the name of
democracy and freedom. As we will see next, 'Auschwitz the message’ is
now deeply rooted within the core of the Anglo-American notion of
democracy and liberal thinking.

On the face of it, it seems as if the liberal Western subject is
trained to believe that it is the lesson of Auschwitz that entitles us
all to ground the political in the personal. Thus, it isn’t really a
coincidence that the official Holocaust narrative had become the entry
card into the Anglo-American or even Western discourse. Accordingly, it
isn’t really a coincidence that Holocaust shrines are now sprouting up
like mushrooms in every major Western capital. In the UK for instance,
a permanent Holocaust exhibition occupies a large part of the Empire
War Museum. Clearly, the Jewish Holocaust has very little to do with
the general perception of British Empire History. In fact, the Empire
has many other non-Jewish Shoahs
to account for. Yet, the absurdity is even greater, it is rather
crucial to mention that it was the British Empire that was so reluctant
to help European Jews escape their doomed fate. It was Lord Bevin’s
1939 White Paper that stopped Jews from immigrating to Palestine when
danger for their lives was immanent. It was the RAF that repeatedly
dismissed the necessity of bombing Auschwitz. We have a very good
reason to assume that the British decision to capitalise on Auschwitz
and the Jewish Holocaust narrative is rather a highly calculated
political move.

A Holocaust memorial opened its gates
in Washington a few years ago, yet it is very hard to cover the clear
fact that Roosevelt did very little to help European Jews during the
war. The American administration didn’t change its immigration laws
between 1933-45 in order to prevent mass immigration of European Jews
into the USA. Again, we have a very good reason to assume that the
American decision to capitalise on Auschwitz and the Jewish Holocaust
narrative is there to serve a very specific cause. Let me say it, this
cause is not history per se, in fact it is there to undermine historical thinking and to cover up some crucial historical facts.

Auschwitz is indeed a horrible story of a total abuse of human rights
by a sovereign State. It is certainly a disastrous account of the
violation of human liberty. Auschwitz is the ultimate story of
violation of the most fundamental rights, Auschwitz is certainly a
story of State terrorism and considering the fact that the
Anglo-Americans present themselves as the guardians of human liberty,
it is not surprising that Auschwitz settled comfortably within the core
of English speaking cultural and political thought. This may as well
explain why rather than being a historical event, Auschwitz has become
a political argument grounded on a collection of graphic personal and
biographical accounts. In some European countries Auschwitz has now
become a legally sealed list of prohibitions and laws that are set to
prevent any possible historical scrutiny. Unfortunately, the Holocaust
and WWII are now covered with a heavy cloud of quasi moral smoke that
blocks any serious treatment of the event, either scholarly or
artistically.

Auschwitz and the Holocaust are now realised mainly in political terms.
Auschwitz is shaping the Western vision of history as well as the
vision of any possible future. Moreover, 'Auschwitz the message’ stands
as a perceptual mediator and a gatekeeper of any possible Western
political ideology. Unless you acknowledge and approve the way
Auschwitz is considered, you are not allowed in. In case you do not
know what I’m talking about, you may ask the Iranian president, surely
he can tell you more about the subject.

Needless to say, the vision of Auschwitz 'the historical event’ is
totally shaped by 'Auschwitz the message’. In other words, any
scholarly access into the Judeocide aspects of World War II is now
totally denied. Furthermore, unless one approves and repeats the
official Holocaust narrative, one may find oneself locked behind bars.
This happened lately to three rightwing history revisionists who dared
to suspect the official Auschwitz narrative. Regardless of what they
have to say, whether one accepts their views or not, the idea of
locking people up just for trying to shape our vision of the past is
rather alarming. In fact, it means that we have totally failed in
internalising the most crucial lesson of the war against Nazism. To
employ thought police is exactly what totalitarianism is all about. To
lock a historical revisionist up is to become a Nazi and the reason is
simple: if Auschwitz is indeed a story of total personal abuse then
denying freedom of speech is nothing but surrendering to the Nazi
methods of personal abuse.[3]

Admittedly, Auschwitz has now become the very essence of the liberal
democratic argument. It is a timeless event, a crude and banal glimpse
into evilness. It often takes new shapes and new faces. Yet, some
parameters always remain the same. Within the Auschwitz ideological
apparatus there is always clear binary opposition at stake. Auschwitz
suggests a clear dichotomy between the 'good’ and the 'evil’, between
the 'open society’ and its 'enemies’, between 'West’ and 'the rest’,
between the 'democratic man’ and the 'savage’, between Israel and Iran,
between the 'Judeo-Christian’ and 'Islam’ and most importantly between
the 'universal humanist liberator’ and the 'dark oppressor’[4]

Somehow, it is always the West that awards itself and itself alone with
the legal capacity of enforcing the moral of Auschwitz. Somehow, most
Western people still fail to see that within the emerging so called
'cultural clash’, it is the Palestinians who are locked in a
concentration camp named Gaza, they are obviously surrounded by the
Israeli Vermacht and blitzed by American-made bombers dropped by American planes piloted by Israeli Luftwaffe top guns. Most Westerners fail to grasp that it is the West that is fighting an energetic Lebensraum
expansionist war in the deserts of the Middle East. Why do we fail to
see it? Because we are submerged within a dubious moral jargon that is
there to impose some severe intellectual blindness upon us. Rather than
thinking ethically and in categorical terms, we are giving in to the
flood of shallow personal narrative rhetoric a la Blair and Bush. When
those two were left with no forensic evidence to justify their illegal
war in Iraq, they simply shifted their reasoning rhetoric to the
Hitler-like Saddam Hussein. The invasion of the Iraqi oil reserves was
retroactively justified by the necessity of removing the murderous
tyrant. As strange as it may be, no one actually provided us with any
real solid forensic evidence to back that very allegation of colossal
breeches of human rights. Indeed, occasionally we saw some devastating
mass graves exposed in the desert, but then a few days later, we would
learn from an expert that those graves were actually a legacy of the
bloody Iran-Iraq war. Worryingly, we have never asked for real evidence
for Saddam’s crimes. We happened to be satisfied enough with some
sporadic televised personal accounts. Apparently, we love to watch
televised images of pain. As I mentioned before, we are enthusiastic
about reacting collectively to a moral call.

In the
liberal democratic world, the elected leader is doomed to justify his
wars, to back them with solid or at least convincing moral arguments.
As it happened, Tony Blair had to stand in front of the Parliament and
justify his latest illegal war. At the time of its occurrence, the
British government had to justify the erasure of Dresden. Similarly,
the American administration had to provide sound reasoning for the
outrageous use of atomic bombs against civilians.

Indeed, Western governments are inclined to providing us with some
shallow ad hoc political and moral arguments that have the tendency of
maturing into historic narratives. Yet, we do not have to accept those
accounts. We are more than entitled to revise those 'official
arguments’ and historic narratives. To understand the contemporary
political rhetoric is to be able to study and criticise it. But then,
to revise the present is to re-visit the past. At least categorically,
there is not much difference between the erasure of Dresden, Hiroshima,
Caen, Fallujah or Najaf.

May I add at this point that I am totally convinced that denying
Auschwitz should never have become a legal issue. The question of
whether there was a mass homicide with gas or 'just’ a mass death toll
due to total abuse in horrendous conditions is no doubt a crucial
historical question. The fact that such a major historical chapter less
than seven decades ago is scholarly inaccessible undermines the entire
historical endeavour. If we cannot talk about our grandparents’
generation, how dare we ever say something about Napoleon or even the
Romans? Personally speaking, I may admit that I am not that interested
in the question above. I am not an historian, I am not qualified as
one. Being trained as a philosopher, I rather ask 'what is history all
about?’ 'What can we say about the past?’

For me, the entire issue is purely ethical: challenging the dubious
morality of the Western concern with Auschwitz is essential for the
task of challenging those who kill daily in the name of 'Auschwitz the
message’. I am obviously referring here to Israel, America and Britain.
Ostensibly, there is far more pain inflicted by those who maintain
'Auschwitz the message’ than by those who dare challenging the
historical validity of its official narrative.

Is the Personal Political?

Though there is a clear tendency amongst some major Western institutes
to impose the personal as a political message all in the name of
liberty and humanism, it is rather crucial to mention that this very
political apparatus achieves exactly the opposite effect. Politically,
it silences the very personal.

Once the personal becomes political, the singular voice loses its
importance and authenticity disappears. Once a society willingly
endorses discourse based on a 'correct’ collective empathy, first, the
so-called 'empathy’ is reduced into a mere 'call’ rather than a vivid
sensation, but most importantly, the voice of the genuine sufferer
fades into the void.

In other words, within the Western liberal apparatus the singular voice
often gets lost. If humanism is indeed a universal value, then the
particular and singular becomes a public asset, the victim serves an
instrumental role, he conveys a universal message. Once the personal
becomes political, morality becomes a private-like discourse of
righteousness. Rather than a general ethical abstract rule grounded on
a true reflection, we would start to hear some ad hoc, self-centred and
half-baked moral arguments.[5] This may explain why rather
occasionally, yesterday’s victims turn into today’s oppressors. For
instance, it may explain why it didn’t take the Jewish State more than
three years after the liberation of Auschwitz to ethnically cleanse 85%
of the Palestinian indigenous population. Seemingly, the Jewish State
has never matured enough to ethically endorse the moral lesson of the
Holocaust. The reason is simple: as far as Israel is concerned, the
Holocaust has never been realised as a general abstract ethical
insight. Instead, it was grasped solely from a collective Judeo-centric
perspective. The personal pain was properly politicised. A humanist
would expect that young Israeli high school students who visit
Auschwitz and confront their ancestors’ suffering would tend to
empathise with the plight of the oppressed, and would identify with the
Palestinians who are caged behind walls and starved to death at the
hands of a nationalist racist regime seeking Lebensraum.
Indeed the truth is shocking, less than a year after their visit to
Auschwitz those same Israeli youngsters join the IDF, outwardly, they
learned their political lesson in Auschwitz. Rather than taking the
side of the oppressed i.e., Palestinians, they apparently willingly
endorse some SS Einsatzgruppen tactics.

But
it isn’t only the Palestinians who happen to suffer from the
politicisation and industrialisation of the Holocaust personal
narrative. Once the Holocaust had become 'the new Jewish religion’, it
was the real, genuine victim who was robbed of his own intimate
personal biography. The very private disastrous narrative has now
become collective Jewish property. The real singular Holocaust
survivor, the one who lived the horror, has been robbed of his very
personal life experience. Similarly, within the extremist militant
feminist view, which refers rapist qualities to the entire male gender,
the genuine female rape victim is losing her voice. She is fading into
the mass. Within the radical feminist political discourse the rape
victim isn’t special at all: if all men are rapists, all women are
victims.

Finkelstein’s 'Holocaust Industry’ teaches us that once world Jewry
adopted the Holocaust as its new institutional communal bond, the
Holocaust was rapidly transformed into an industrial affair. The real
victims were left behind. The funds and reparation money that were
allocated for their recovery and the restoration of their very human
dignity one way or another found its way to some Zionist and Jewish
organizations. Somehow, this makes a lot of sense. Once the personal
Holocaust narrative has become a collective political faith, almost
everyone is entitled to be an ordinary disciple or even a priest.
Consequently, we are now entitled to deduce that within the
politicisation of the personal narrative, no one is left to own a
biography. We are left with a collective ecstasies mindset that draws
its power from a set of communally shared floating personal accounts.

Going along with the hermeneutic line of thought we may conclude that the political becomes personal.

The Political is Personal, The Crucial Role of Jewish Neurosis

The bizarre emergence of the so-called Israeli '3rd generation’, young
Holocaust post- traumatic Israelis, is exactly that. It is a form of a
new collective religious worshiping. To be a 3rd generation is to join
a belief system. To be personally traumatised by a past one has never
entertained. It is to assimilate within a heavily orchestrated
political precept. In fact, the 3rd generation are locked within a
vicious trap that leads towards total alienation: the more those young
Israelis who were born a few decades after the end of the last great
war claim to be traumatized by the Nazis, the less the rest of humanity
can take them seriously. The less they are taken seriously, the more
those young Israelis feel deprived of minimal human dignity and
respect. The more they are deprived, the more they are fixated onto
their new politically imposed notion of trauma.

In a way, this is exactly the path towards religious isolation. The
so-called '3rd generation’ are entangled within a narrative that leads
towards a form of total alienation, a clear detachment from any
recognised human cultural environment or reality. It is the religious
zeal i.e., trauma, that shapes that reality. One would expect that this
form of collective neurosis would mature into a cultural separation
wall between Jews and others. Surprisingly enough, not only did this
not happen, if anything, it is the other way around. The Jewish
discourse is integrated as a central part of Western consciousness.
While some Jews would insist upon liberating themselves from the
Holocaust burden that imposed a clear stain of hopeless impotence on
their collective identity, the Western political system needs the
Holocaust and the Jews to be the carrier of its narrative. Furthermore,
the West needs the Jewish neurosis. It is the myth-like shaped
narrative that facilitates the political and the commercial hegemony in
a world that loses its contact with any genuine abstract categorical
ethical thinking. The Holocaust is taking the shape of a belief system
and the traumatised Jews are serving as its altar.

From a Western perspective, the Jews have an instrumental role in
maintaining the liberal fundaments filling it with some devastating
vivid poetic expressionism. This may explain why Holocaust denial laws
are imposed in several countries, especially in countries where Zionist
and Jewish lobbies’ influence is relatively minor. The Israeli scholar
Yeshayahu Leibovitch, himself an observant Jew, noticed many years ago
that the Jewish religion is dead, and that the Holocaust is the new
religion uniting Jews around the world. I am inclined to agree that the
Holocaust is now shaped as a religion. It is there to replace an
anthropocentric ethical thinking. The Holocaust religion is there to
rob the Western being of genuine ethical humanist thinking all in the
name of humanism.

The emergence and the evolution of the Holocaust belief system is the subject I will try to explore next.

The Scientific, the Technological and the Religious

I would like now to look at the evolvement of three major 20th century
Western discourses: the scientific, the technological and the
religious.

The scientific discourse can be defined as a highly structured form of
'knowledge seeking’. Within the scientific worldview, man confronts
nature and tries to get to the bottom of it. The technological
discourse, on the other hand, is far less concerned with knowledge
gathering, it is rather orientated around the transformation of
knowledge into power. The technologist would say, 'It’s of no concern
to me whether you are applying Newtonian mechanics or Einstein’s
relativity theory, just make sure that you get me to the moon, (you may
as well make sure that it doesn’t cost too much).’ On the face of it,
both the scientific and the technological discourses set man apart from
nature. Both discourses imply human detachment from nature. The reason
is pretty simple, if man can get to the bottom of nature, then man must
be somehow greater or at least a different quality to nature. From a
technological point of view, if nature and the knowledge of nature are
there to serve man, then man must somehow be superior to nature.

Seemingly, these two discourses dominated the 20th century
Anglo-American intellectual discourse. And since it was the
Anglo-Americans who dominated our universe at least since the end of
WWII, we are entitled to argue that these two thinking modes have been
dominating the entire Western discourse for more than a while. In other
words, to be Western in the 20th century meant to think scientifically
and to act technologically. Accordingly, growing up in the West would
mean, first learning to admire the scientist and to worship science,
then gradually learning to applaud and consume technological
innovations.

Academically speaking, it was the positivist school that insisted that
we should become more scientific and far less philosophical.
Historically at least, it was the Vienna Circle, a group of
philosophers and scientists who aimed at eradicating any traces of
metaphysics out of the body of scientific knowledge. For the logical
positivists, 'logical rules and empirical data are the only sources of
knowledge.’ Needless to say, logical positivism was an attempt to
strike against the diversity of human reality. As some of the readers
of this paper would hopefully agree: emotions, feelings and aesthetic
pleasure can be equally as important as sources of knowledge and even
scientific realisation, not to say insight. Nevertheless, the logical
positivists wouldn’t agree, they were full of contempt towards
quasi-scientific knowledge. Psychoanalysis, for instance, was like a
red rug to a bull, it was totally unacceptable. Logical positivism
wasn’t just an attack against emotional and spiritual expression, it
was also a clear offensive on German philosophy. It was an unambiguous
assault on German metaphysics, Idealism and early Romanticism.

In 1936, following the Nazi incursion of Austria, there were no
positivists left in Vienna, due to their ethnic origin they had to
flee. Most of them found shelter in Anglo-American universities. I do
believe that the overwhelming positivistic tendency within the post-war
English speaking academic world has a lot to do with the forced
immigration of those Jewish-German positivists. And yet, America has
never been a scientifically orientated nation. Not 'many’ scientific
revolutions took place on the other side of the Atlantic. America is
the land of open opportunities and science was no doubt a great
opportunity.

Rather than internalising the spirit of science, America was very
efficient in transforming science into political and economic power. It
was quick in allowing a bunch of exiled European scientists, most of
them German Jews (as well as one Italian married to an Jewish woman),
to build its first atomic bombs. It was very quick in embracing German
rocket scientists who were enthusiastic enough to blast monkeys into
outer space. The American intellectual world has never been too
enthusiastic about abstract theoretical, not to say philosophical,
questions. The very Germanic question 'Was ist?’
didn’t really make it to the Anglo-American academic world. On the
contrary, America has always been concerned with technological
challenges. In other words, it is enthusiastic about the different mode
of transformation of knowledge into power. America is all about
technology, it is pragmatically orientated. Even within art, where
America happens to contribute some major works of modern art and music,
it didn’t take long before a market value was tagged. At the end of the
day, it doesn’t really matter what you may know about the origin of
knowledge as long as you drink Coke, eat McDonalds, buy a Charlie
Parker album and dream of owning an original by Kandinsky.

It is within this very pragmatic approach that led to the rise of a new
form of contemporary unique religious discourse. While the scientific
and the technological approaches set man aside from nature, the new
Western religion re-locates man deeply within nature. The new Western
subject, very much like the rock and the tree, lacks any substantial
sense of self-awareness or critical tendencies. Willingly and
enthusiastically, the newly formed Western being tends to accept some
readymade reality perceptions. Within this newly emerging mythological
faith, Democracy is one God, the Holocaust is another. These two Gods
support each other. Democracy is the blind praise of human liberty a la
Natan Sharansky whom George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice repeatedly
quote. Holocaust, on the other hand, is the story of the ultimate
persecution and everlasting revenge a la Simon Weisenthal.
Democracy is the matter, the noticeable and manifested glory with white
houses and glass skyscrapers. The Holocaust is the spirit, the Holy
Arc, that thing which you follow in the desert but can never enter,
question or challenge. The Holocaust God is standing at the very core
of the argument for democracy that allows the Anglo-Americans to insist
upon 'liberating’ the very few countries that still hold some energy
resources or are found to be located strategically close enough to
these resources.

As we can see, the two Gods,
Holocaust and Democracy, are cleverly set in a complementary
relationship. The message is clear: unless Democracy is in place, a
Holocaust is inevitable. Apparently, Anglo-Americans are using
democracy as a political argument to violently expand their economic
global hegemony. The less we are convinced by the democratic goddess,
the less we believe our elected politicians and their illegal wars, the
more we are dependent on an external supernatural paradigm. Auschwitz
is exactly that paradigm. It is the ultimate supernatural narrative in
which ordinary human beings become killing machines. It is the
Auschwitz narrative in which the most culturally advanced nation is
becoming a willing executioner a la Daniel Goldenhagen.

The Holocaust God is there to sketch the alternative doomed reality.
But as bizarre as it may sound, it is democratic America that has been
lethally applying science against innocent civilians for over six
decades. Whether it is Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, whether it is
Vietnam or Iraq among many more places, the same story repeats itself:
Anglo-Americans are killing en masse
in the name of Democracy. There is always a clear valid moral cause
behind their kill. Allegedly, lately they liberated the Iraqi people
from the tyranny of the 'Hitler-like’ mass murderer Saddam. Yet, it is
crucial to mention that although the Americans and their puppet Iraqi
legislators had enough time to collect more than enough forensic
evidence to incriminate Mr Saddam Hussein, they were unable to do so.
On the face of it, Mr Hussein’s charges in court are negligible
compared to the charges that can be already established against Bush or
Blair. Obviously, what is true about Saddam is applicable to the other
'Hitler-like' Milosevic. As we happen to learn, for the time being,
very little as been established to convict the former Serbian leader, a
man who was repeatedly presented to us as a mass murderer. Again, I am
far from being judgmental here, I just follow the legal proceedings
against these two 'Hitler-like’ ex-tyrants.

Here we
come across the beauty and strength of religious belief. It is always
flourishing in the regions of blindness. You can indeed love God as
long as you cannot see him. You can join the party and hate Saddam as
long as you know very little about him or Iraq. Worshipping and hatred
alike are blind tendencies. Similarly, the strength of Auschwitz is due
to its incomprehensibility. Auschwitz is feasible as long as it
infeasible. Auschwitz is the modern-day burning bush, it is
counterfactual. You can believe in it as long as you cannot comprehend
it, as long as it doesn’t make sense, as long as it is beyond
contemplation. Like a Holy Arc, you would follow it in the desert just
because you aren’t allowed in. Auschwitz is the sealed sacred secret of
the Anglo-American emerging religion. It is the unseen face of God
delivered in a form of personal accounts. Once you question it, you
challenge the future of Anglo-American life on this planet. Once you
question Auschwitz, you become a modern-day Antichrist. Instead of
doing that, you are highly recommended to kneel down and to approve the
newly emerging burning bush mythology.

History

Within the Jewish orthodox apparatus history in general and Jewish
history in particular are totally redundant. Simply, there is no need
for such an intellectual endeavour, the Bible is there to set the
Judaic thinking parameters. Judaically speaking, Saddam, Chmelnisky,
Hitler and even Arafat are nothing but a mere repetition of the
horrendous Biblical Amalek. With the Bible in place, there is no need
to question the empirical and forensic validity of the different
burning bushes and the Holy arcs. The Jewish belief is based on blind
acceptance. To love God is to obey his rules. To be a Jew is never ever
to question the fundaments. Apparently, there is no Jewish Theology.
Instead, Jews have their Talmud: a collection of laws and rules. This
perception is far from being stupid. It is rather logical and
consistent. If God is indeed a supreme transcendental entity that
exceeds any notion of space and time, then man is doomed to fail in
comprehending him anyway. Thus, rather than philosophising on
fundaments, Rabbis are mainly concerned with regulations. They are
there to say what is Kosher
and who is a sinner. Similarly, within the newly emerging
Anglo-American religion, no one is supposed to raise questions
concerning the Holocaust or WWII. Moreover, no one is supposed to ask
what freedom, liberty, human rights and democracy really mean. The
question of whether or not we are free beings is far too philosophical.
Rather than suggesting an answer, we are confronted with the Rabbinical
icons Blair and Bush who restrict of our freedom all in the name of
freedom.

Let’s leave the Iraqis out. Are we, the
so-called West, liberated? Within the new Israelite Western religion,
blindness is the way forwards. On the face of it, the complexity of the
WWII narrative with its contradictions and discrepancies just
contributes to its magical, fantastic and supernatural qualities. We
better learn to accept the Hollywood take on WWII rather than adopting
some silly sceptical approach. Indeed, it is the contradictions and
discrepancies that turn the Holocaust into a vivid human story shaped
as a religion. It is the inconsistencies that turn the Holocaust into a
modern-day burning bush. Let’s face it, you cannot see God but you can
clearly hear the voice of democracy and freedom echoing from within the
cloud of smoke. Indeed the political is what is left out of that which
was personal at one time.

Appendix 1

With their trousers halfway down I can see these three outlaws: Irving,
Zundel and Germar, the three rightwing historical revisionists who
happen to be locked behind bars. They are surrounding our precious
shrine, rudely they are pissing over our emerging democratic miracle.
Vulgarly, they question the validity of the personal narrative;
foolishly they aim at establishing a rational, dynamic, lucid
empirically grounded narrative based on forensic evidence. The three
criminals are applying logical-positivistic methods. Pathetically, they
follow the tradition of Carnap, Popper and the Vienna Circle. I wonder
whether they realise that they happen to follow an academic tradition
set by a Jewish secular Germanic school. Those ugly revisionists are
aiming at truth-values, correspondence rules, empiricism. Shame on
them, let them rot in hell. They fail to see that the West has moved
forward. Listen you revisionists, you missed the train, we aren’t
scientific anymore, we aren’t even technological. We are now deeply
religious and we aren’t even theological about it. We are Evangelical,
we take things on their face value and don’t ask me whose face is it.
We want to believe. We are now religious and we will make sure that you
do not interfere.

Appendix 2

Rather than suggesting a preferable historical narrative, I aim at
grasping what history is all about. What are the conditions of the
possibilities of any knowledge of the past? I am not an historian and I
am not intending to be one, I am interested in the conditions that
shape the historical narrative. When it comes to the history of the
20th century, we are locked within a strict tale that was imposed on us
by the winners. True, history is the tale of the winners and yet the
winners were and still are: capitalist, colonialist and imperialists.
The question to be asked is how come the European left that
traditionally opposed the above, tended to blindly buy the twisted tale
of those 'colonialist’ 'capitalist’ winners? I assume that the fact
that Stalin was amongst the winners has something to do with it. The
fact that the left was itself chased by Hitler is probably another
reason. Yet, USSR is itself part of our past, Stalin is gone and
Leftists aren’t chased by Hitler anymore. The European left is now
entitled to think freely. Supposedly we are now at liberty to re-view
our knowledge of the past, we are entitled to re-ask questions and to
try to re-solve some major discrepancies to do with WWII. I am not
talking here about a truthful historical account, because unlike David
Irving and his bitter academic opponent Richard J. Evans, I do not know
what historical truth is. But I do understand what narrative is and I
even realise what consistency means. I argue that not only are we
entitled to revise history, we must do so and I will mention two
reasons: A). If the left or what is left of it, won’t jump into this
boiling swamp, WWII history and Holocaust scholarship will be left in
the hands of the European radical right (politically and academically).
I tend to believe that at large, this is already the case. While left
academics are mainly concerned with signalling out Holocaust deniers
telling us what is right and who is wrong, it is the revisionists who
engage themselves in detailed archive work as well as forensic
scrutiny. B). Those who dropped bombs over Dresden and Hiroshima have
never stopped killing in the name of democracy. They are now engaged in
a murderous occupation of Iraq and they are even planning to expand to
Syria and Iran. If we want to stop them, we better re-visit our past
and revise our image of Anglo-American democracy. We must re-arrange
the 20th century. For the sake of a better future we must revise the
past.

Appendicitis

It is rather clear that at least from an Anglo-American perspective
Hitler wasn’t the enemy. Stalin, the Communist tyrant, was their real
foe. Hitler had a very precise role. He was there to bash the eastern
Communists on behalf of the West, he was there to flatten the Reds and
so he did for a while. This may explain why no one in the West really
tried to stop Hitler in the 1930’s. From an Anglo-American point of
view, the moustached man fitted in rather nicely. It may explain why
Hitler himself didn’t eradicate a third of the British army in Dunkirk.
Why should he? These British soldiers were his allies to come. May I
suggest that the fact that Hitler was actually serving Western
interests explains why the Americans who joined the war in 1942, didn’t
engage with him in a battle over central Europe until June 1944. Rather
than fight Hitler in the main ground, they engaged in battles in North
Africa and in Southern Italy. The reason is simple: They wanted Hitler
to exhaust Stalin. They didn’t want to jeopardise his holy mission.
Once Hitler lost his 6th Army in Stalingrad, the Western perception of
Hitler’s role changed dramatically.

Once it was clear that Hitler was losing to Stalin, there was a
necessity to keep the Reds as far as possible from the British channel.
Though the Allies presented themselves as the liberators of France, in
fact they were raiding the beaches of Normandy speeding up to stop
Stalin in central Europe. This may explain the devastation the Allies
left behind them in Normandy. Liberators hardly slaughter the
liberated, Anglo-Americans are apparently different.

From mid-1943, the Allies enjoyed air superiority over Germany and yet,
rather than dismantle the German army and it logistic targets, they
concentrated on carpet-bombing German towns, killing hundred of
thousands of innocent civilians with phosphorus bombs. After the war,
Albert Speer was quoted saying that considering the Allies’ air
superiority, a bombardment of German industrial infrastructure and
logistic targets would have resulted in German military collapse in
less then two months. I assume that the military reason behind the
Allies’ carpet bombardment is devastatingly simple. The Allies didn’t
want to disturb the German Army that was fighting Stalin. Meanwhile,
the Allies had many bombs and they had to drop them somewhere. Around
850,000 German civilians died in those murderous military operations.

Anglo-Americans do believe in attacking their enemies’ soft bellies.
This is why British and Americans arrived at the war with tactic
bombers (Lancaster, B-17 and B24). Within the Anglo-American tactical
philosophy, heavy pressure of civilian population would benefit the
offender. This may explain the fact that it was Churchill who was the
first to use Blitz tactics, launching a heavy bombardment on Berlin in
August 1940. In fact it was that move that led Hitler to retaliate and
to divert Luftwaffe efforts
from Britain’s southern airfields to London and other populated British
cities (September 7, 1940). Indeed, it was Churchill’s cold decision
that saved Britain from a Nazi invasion (Operation Sea Lion). Yet, we
should never forget that it was Churchill who brought German
retaliation to the British streets. This fact hardly finds its way into
British history texts.

Within the victorious
narrative, the use of atomic bombs was necessary in order to shorten
the war. Within the Anglo-American narrative, nuking Hiroshima and
Nagasaki sounds almost like a humanitarian effort. Apparently, there is
an historic chronological fact that doesn’t find its place into the
English-speaking history curriculum. Two days after the Hiroshima bomb
(August 6, 1945) the Soviets entered the war against Japan. It was that
event which led the Americans to nuke Nagasaki just a day later.
Clearly, the industrial liquidation of thousands of Japanese civilians
was there to guarantee a rapid, unconditional Japanese defeat to the
Americans and to them alone.

I tend to believe that the Holocaust narrative that is forcefully
imposed on us all is there to silence some alternative interpretations
of WWII events. I do believe that if we really want to stop
Anglo-Americans from killing in the name of democracy we better re-open
a genuine debate.

Stopping Bush and Blair in Iraq, stopping those warmongers from
proceeding to Iran and Syria is a must. If history shapes the future,
we need to liberate our perspective of the past, rather than arresting
revisionists, we simply need many more of them. We must let go; we must
Re-arrange the 20th century.

[1] (Zionism and other Marginal Thoughts Counter Punch). Husserl suggests that one can refer to 'Evidenz’,
which is a form of unmediated awareness. Accordingly, it is possible to
experience a pure awareness of oneself. Husserl stresses that an
individual’s self-awareness can convey an authentic form of knowledge.

Martin Heidegger refused to go along with Husserl’s perception; he
indeed exposed a major flaw in Husserl’s thought. According to
Heidegger, unmediated awareness is actually hard to conceive. Human
beings, he rightly said, do operate within language. Language is out
there before one comes into the world. Once one enters the realm of
language, a separating wall made of symbolic lingual bricks and
cultural mortar thwarts one’s access to any possible 'unmediated
awareness’. Can we think without applying language? Can we experience
at all without the mediation of language? As soon as we name or rather
say - once within language - we can never be authentic anymore. It
would seem that a comprehensive authentic awareness is impossible.
Consequently, personal narrative, though plausible, can never convey an
'authentic reality’, it is always shaped by a predated language and
even cultural conditions.

[2] The leftist may say, 'being a son of a survivor, I am more than
entitled to criticise the State of Israel, Zionism or even the
exploitation of the Holocaust by Jewish organisations. On the contrary,
the Jewish hawk would maintain that it is precisely the tale of
Auschwitz told by his parents that gives meaning to the Zionist
project, set there to prevent Auschwitz from repeating itself.

[3] On a first glance it was very encouraging to learn that Deborah
Lipstadt, the leading warrior in the war against Holocaust denial, was
actually calling upon the Austrian authorities to let the Historical
Revisionist David Irving free. "Let the guy go home. He has spent
enough time in prison," she said. It didn’t take long to realize that
what may sound like tolerance and forgiveness is in fact a cold
instrumental maintenance of the official Auschwitz narrative. "I am
uncomfortable with imprisoning people for speech," says Lipstadt and
stresses on, "Let him go and let him fade from everyone's radar
screens." We are entitled to assume that Lipstadt's concerns with
Irving’s re-appearance have something to do with Irving's willingness
as well as capacity to challenge the official Holocaust narrative.
Seemingly, the American Rabbinical academics enthusiastically endorse
'freedom of speech’ just in order to silence her foe.

Apparently, Lipstadt isn’t alone. "If Austria wants to prove itself a
modern democracy," argues Christian Fleck, a sociologist at the
University of Graz, "you use argument, not the law against Holocaust
deniers." BBC article
. This indeed sounds like a proper argument you could expect to hear
from a European scholar. Yet the Austrian sociologist doesn’t stop
there; unwittingly, he presents what he regards as a correct academic
argument: "Irving is a fool - and the best way of dealing with fools is
to ignore them… Are we really afraid of someone whose views on the past
are palpable nonsense, at a time when every schoolchild knows of the
horrors of the Holocaust? Are we saying his ideas are so powerful we
can't argue with him?" (ibid). Seemingly, Fleck is not fully familiar
with basic logical formulation. To 'use an argument’ isn’t to present a
conclusion as a premise. Fleck’s academic duty is to prove beyond doubt
that Irving is indeed a fool. This would mean something slightly more
substantial than the 'common knowledge of a schoolboy’. Again, without
addressing Irving’s accountability, without referring to the validity
of his arguments, we find ourselves learning about the current dubious
notion of Western tolerance. I would argue that Fleck and Lipstadt
alike are interested merely in an image of tolerance. Something that
looks like freedom but in fact maintains hegemony.

[4] It is rather important to mention at this point that that it is
within the above very dichotomy where the Iranian president is singled
out and left with no other option but endorsing what is seen by some as
a Holocaust denial narrative. It is crucial to mention that the Iranian
president is not alone, many Muslims and Arabs feel the same. Once
Auschwitz becomes the symbol of reconciliation between Jews and
Christians, Islam in general and Arabs in particular are left to be
seen as a universal global threat. They are practically evicted from
the Western discourse. If this isn’t enough, they are dispossessed of
elementary human dignity. To a certain extent, the only way around it
for them may be to dismiss the Holocaust altogether.

"If you care so much about the Jews," asks Ahmadinejad the Iranian
president, "why don’t you take them back?" Although such a suggestion
may sound bizarre at first, it indeed conveys logical and consistent
deconstruction of the Auschwitz ideological apparatus at least from the
point of view of today’s oppressed. At the end of the day, the
Holocaust is a Western affair. Neither the Arabs nor the Muslims have
anything to do with it. The Judeocide took place in the heart of
Europe. If Europeans and especially Germans indeed feel unease with
their collective past, they may have to consider providing the Jewish
Israeli citizens with German passports rather than supplying the
Israeli Navy with three brand new submarines furnished with nuclear
facilities. Somehow, Germany prefers the latter option. I’ll let the
reader guess why.

It is rather crucial to mention as well that the Palestinians are
'Hitler’s last victims’. No one can doubt the clear fact that it was
indeed the Holocaust that transformed Zionism from being a marginal
aspiration ideology into the motor and justification of a racist
nationalist State. Thus, again, if the Germans feel uncomfortable with
their past, it is the Palestinians whom they must look after. Let’s not
stop there: if the Palestinians are indeed the last victims of Hitler,
why aren’t they entitled to develop their own Shoah narrative?

If I am correct here, then the unique left solidarity movement, which
suggests accommodating a pro-Palestinian stand together with Auschwitz
religious worshiping is doomed to failure (Al Ahram Weekly guest commentary).
The two are conflicting not to say in contradiction. As long as
Auschwitz fails to become a categorical ethical insight as well as an
historic chapter, it is Auschwitz itself that stands in the core of the
Zionist led oppression of the Arab people and Palestinians in
particular.

5] I would suggest at this stage to
re-introduce Kant’s ethics. According to Kant, moral requirements are
based on a standard of rationality he defined as the "Categorical
Imperative": "Always act in such a way that the maxim of your action
can be willed as a universal law." Moral judgment is dependent on a
procedure of self-reflection rather than the acceptance of a rule.

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